Forsyth County seeks clarity from state about whether adopted siblings can marry

Forsyth County is seeking clarity from the North Carolina General Assembly about whether adopted siblings can legally marry each other. The issue was included in its list of legislative priorities, which the county submits to its lobbyist for advocacy at the state level. 

This year, there were a total of six goals. Most were routine, like securing additional funding for a park project and adjusting a rule related to foster child placement.

But the item related to sibling marriage appeared to surprise County Attorney Gordon Watkins as he presented the list to the Board of Commissioners. 

“The last one is a very peculiar situation about adoption,” he said. “It’s unclear about whether non-blood related adopted siblings can be married. So that's something that came from the from the Register of Deeds on that one.” 

Register of Deeds Lynne Johnson says the issue isn’t hypothetical.

“There was a young couple who came in, and the person in the office who issued the license noticed that they had the same parent names and addresses,” she says. “She inquired about it, and they said they had both been adopted by the same foster parents.”

Johnson and her staff went down a rabbit hole trying to figure it out. They learned the North Carolina Register of Deeds guidebook does have rules about marriages between double cousins — or people who are first cousins through both sets of their parents — but nothing on adopted siblings. 

She asked the University of North Carolina School of Government about it and learned it isn’t addressed directly by North Carolina state law. So she ran it up the flagpole to her boss, the county manager. That’s how it made it to this year’s priority list. 

“So that if it does come up again, we will know exactly what we can say to a customer regarding the legality,” she says. “I mean, where's the line drawn?”

The problem doesn’t appear to be widespread though. Amy Shook, the president of the North Carolina Association of Registers of Deeds says she’s never encountered it before. 

“If we were to ask all 100 registers if this is an issue for them or something they want to see changed, probably Lynne from Forsyth County, she will probably be the only one to raise her hand,” she says. 

There is an adoption-related rule she says all 100 want changed though: one that prevents local registers from issuing certified birth certificates for adopted people. She says only the state office of vital records in Raleigh can do that, creating some awkward conversations when local registers can’t find information for these customers.

“And a lot of people come to our office and they don't even realize they were adopted,” she says. “And so we're having to be the ones that say, ‘Well, were you adopted?’ It's unfortunate for the person who's standing before us that we can’t issue that certificate for them.”

Shook says the association asked the General Assembly to consider changing that rule last year as part of its legislative priorities, and the issue will likely make it to the top of the list again this year.